Getting Back Into the Swing of Things

Anthropology and Philosophy
"Regular Division of The Plane IV" Illustration by M.C. Escher (1957). The black-and-white tesselated dog motif is built on an iconic representation of a dog. It is iconic in the technical sense of philosopher C.S. Peirce: it is a simplified but quite unambiguous resemblance of a dog. And it looks more like a dog than anything else, although it is clear to the observer that it is not a detailed--let alone realistic--representation. But the overall illustration has a rich, hierarchical indexical structure, built on the patterned mirrored, positive-negative arrangement of the dogs. The dogs, their shadows, their spatial and positive-negative relationships contribute together to an overall sense of patterned, endless movement and interconnection, within and beyond the frame. But the pattern within the frame is finite and simple, built on mirroring, stacking, and sometimes producing a negative (black becomes white and vice versa) for rows of dog icon sequences. This yields a multi-aspect index of symmetry around the horizontal and vertical midlines ... without the overall representation being symmetrical around axis. Here, a logical pattern confuses us, and in doing so, elicits emotionally laden response.

I’ve taken an entirely unintended break since the end of October from blogging. A combination getting serially infected my younger child’s viruses and bacterial infections and simultaneously getting obsessed with a demographic project that I’ll be blogging about in the Spring.

Also, it’s probably no surprise that devoting a series of coherent blog posts to the theme “Anthropology and Philosophy” is the kind of thing that one does rashly, emotionally. And once you’ve committed, you just have to figure it out.

So I’ve taken my time to try to get things they way I would like them. I hope that the next three posts will be worth the time.

Today, I’m posting Anthropology and Philosophy III, which addresses the limits of logic in human systems of symbolic representation. This leads us to the role of emotion in dealing with symbolic representations.

The post after that (IV in the series) will address Alfred Gell’s (1999) brilliant work on art from an anthropological perspective. More than anything else, Gell’s approach provides a major necessary (albeit insufficient) piece of a coherent biocultural theory of human evolution and identity.

The final post will address the emotional dimensions of agency, which constantly involves taking action and making irrational or non-rational choices in the face of symbolic and social dilemmas. This view helps us to understand how emotional systems may have co-evolved with the capacity for linguistic communication, causing the emergence of more prosocial behaviors in the hominin lineage over time. This view further helps us to understand how it is all too easy for humans to be emotionally swayed by irrational ritualized and mythologized narratives of socially excluding or committing violence against individuals representing identities symbolically framed as dangerous to the social order.

I’m happy to be back to blogging about our biocultural evolution and identity. And I hope to hear from you about your thoughts about these themes.

References

Gell, A. (1999). The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams. Berg Publishers.

Anthropology and Philosophy II

Anthropology and Philosophy, Teaching-Learning-Thinking

Causality…

The School of Athens (fresco by Raphael, 1510-11). Public domain image from wikipaintings.org.

Anyone who’s taken time to ponder why–why are states of affairs the way they are, why did they come to be, why do we wonder about what they will become?–realizes that this is hardly a simple problem.

With characteristic clarity, Aristotle acknowledged that causality is complicated, but he asserted that it is straightforward. In Posterior Analytics (Book II, Chapter XI in Bouchier’s English translation; Aristotle 2008) he classifies causes into four categories:

To know a thing is to know its cause; and the Causes, each of which may be used as a middle term in demonstration, are (1) The substantial or Formal cause; (2) The necessary conditions of a thing, or Material cause; (3) That which gave the first impulse to a thing, or Efficient cause; (4) That for the sake of which a thing is done, or Final cause.

This is one of Aristotle’s best-known passages. It characterizes what causes a thing to be in or part of a particular state of affairs. But what does Aristotle mean by the “middle term in demonstration”? Continue reading Anthropology and Philosophy II →

Anthropology and Philosophy I

Anthropology and Philosophy, Teaching-Learning-Thinking

Overview

In the coming couple of weeks, I will be presenting a series of posts on the fundamental, yet very complicated, relationship between Anthropology and Philosophy. The relationship between these two disciplines–one with quite a young intellectual and political history and the other quite ancient–is important. It’s important in part because Anthropology has good reason to depend on Philosophy. It is Philosophy that has established key premises about knowing ourselves and the world. And especially in cultural anthropology and anthropological archaeology, we grapple with major themes of 19th and 20th century philosophical inquiry: meaning, the nature of power and agency in society, and the materiality of being. At the same time, Anthropology’s influence on Philosophy has been fitful but occasionally significant. This is especially the case where the ethnographic documentation of cultural and linguistic diversity has informed arguments about symbolic communication, ethical judgment, and behaviors as embodied practices. The interdisciplinary relationship is complex and sometimes difficult, though. Anthropological observation and analysis has historically needed philosophy more than the other way around. And as the later 20th Century was a period of academic disciplinary specialization–often cascading into fragmentation–much research and writing in these respective disciplines tackled virtually the same phenomena, labeling them with different terms. In short, the later 20th Century intellectual fragmentation that has occurred within Anthropology has also made tenuous and haphazard those connections between Anthropology and Philosophy. And with a deep interest and abiding hope for a “biocultural synthesis” within Anthropology–a consensus-seeking point of departure that views ethnological approaches to symbolic structures, practice, and power as complementary with multi-scalar models of change in biological systems–I suggest that we could benefit from an honest and careful consideration of what each discipline has–and continues–to offer the other. Such a consideration can illuminate new, more effective and relevant ways of inquiring and understanding ourselves and the world.

The next post will deal with general problems and approaches to causality: why do things exist, happen, change … why do we care … and assuming there’s a compelling case for caring about “why questions,” how do we go about defining and answering interesting ones? This post is important, in part because it draws Classical philosophical concepts and arguments from the beginning. How should we consider Aristotle’s discussions of cause, form, chance, necessity, and system? I will compare Aristotle’s quite static or equilibrium paradigm for why things and events are and occur with the more dynamic, fluid view of modern systems approaches, informed as they are not only by mathematics, but also by interdisciplinary inquiry, from biology to economics and physics. This approach underscores key modern scientific insights into complex systems that often show unpredictable, often stochastically behaving patterns over time. In turn, the dynamic systems conceptual foundation allows us to look very critically at approaches to causality in biological anthropology as well as cultural anthropology and archaeology. The non-nested hierarchical dynamic system constitutes a profoundly powerful conceptual tool for analysis, comparison, and explanation of what seem to be incommensurate observational frameworks and phenomena that have hindered biocultural synthesis in Anthropology for decades.

Please do not hesitate to e-mail me with thoughts or questions about this broad but important topic.

Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven

Contemporary Politics, Human Sociality, Culture, and Power

But Nobody Wants to Die

This graph shared by political scientists Ryan Enos and Eitan Hersh on the Washington Post's The Monkey Cage Blog shows how most Democratic Party campaigns overestimate their candidate's standing among voters. Notably, the campaigns studied mainly fall into the upper-right quadrant, which means that most campaigns predicted they would win but actually lost. This graph is from Enos & Hersh 2013: Fig. 2.

First off … I just want to underscore the non-partisan (or para-partisan) nature of my discussions about contemporary politics. So far, I’ve been dealing pretty much with American politics, but hopefully, anthropological consideration of how emotions get folded into political decisions can really help us to think about something more general, albeit in a fresh way: the very political foundations of human sociality. My upcoming posts will be a series on Anthropology and Philosophy, will be a bit more academic, and will aim to bring the focus back to that of biocultural evolution. But recently, I’ve been especially concerned about providing a rarely offered anthropological perspective on the way that marked, dramatic American cultural narratives–which we tell ourselves, selectively listen to, or stage and act in, through the processes of ritualization and mythologization–move likely voters emotionally… so much so that they and the political apparatuses who court their votes can develop quite damaging addictions to the resulting “high,” the sense of stability and control we gain from telling myths and participating in rituals. Yet, if we aren’t careful and critical before we let ourselves get carried away, from the everyday into the emotionally overwhelming realm of myth and ritual, the narratives involved can blind us to how our resulting sense of control or stability actually comes from something else: resolving to build barriers and effectively exclude people from society we consider proper. And this unfortunate moral blindness itself can be strikingly shortsighted, while actually creating further disruption, despite the aim of achieving stability and control.

Continue reading Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven →

The Debt Ceiling Debate, Morality, and the Economy

Contemporary Politics, Human Sociality, Culture, and Power

Or, Magic Networks of People and Their Things …

The ongoing, quite painful and confusing political standoff in Washington is a dual cliffhanger. There’s the slow motion game of Democrat and Republican behemoths playing chicken over continuing regular Federal government funding. And there’s the simultaneous slo-mo race toward the edge over raising the Federal borrowing limit. All of this is a big deal. It’s political drama. It’s also a sometimes genuinely tragic and sometimes melodramatic confrontation with the fact that many of us either need or take for granted certain government services. And it’s definitely a spectacular bare-it-all moment, when it becomes clear that the American voting population is BOTH split AND ambivalent in their beliefs about how money and debt work across private-public and local-global boundaries.

This post addresses this last issue: the ambivalence we have about money and debt.

This ambivalence may be gleaned from survey data published by the Pew Center, in an opinion poll report that I addressed in my previous post on the government shutdown. In the top right panel, it is clear that most people polled state that if the debt ceiling isn’t raised, it’s cause for worry. In fact, the Pew Center report notes that the aggregate opinion favoring raising the debt ceiling has actually improved since the last Washington standoff over this issue, from 40% in 2011 to 47% earlier this week. Yet, the political partisan divide in opinion about how serious the debt ceiling persists. And it’s, well, really conspicuous. For non-Tea Party Republicans, the opinion pattern is almost precisely flipped, when compared to the overall population. 47% of “mainstream” Republicans don’t think it’s a problem if the Federal government cannot borrow enough money to pay existing bills and debt obligations. 40% see raising the debt ceiling as important. The opinion that the debt ceiling should not be raised is by far most common, though, among Tea Party Republicans, where a large majority (64%) are not worried about any consequences of going past next week’s deadline (after which the Federal government will have insufficient funds without the ability to borrow more).

Now, this is clearly a situation in which large groups of adults within a single cultural system simply have developed incompatibly divergent beliefs about how reality works–and is going to work in the near future.

Continue reading The Debt Ceiling Debate, Morality, and the Economy →